Buckminster Fuller
conversations resume Jan. 22

R.
Buckminster Fuller, the polymathic visionary or quixotic egomaniac
(opinion swings in both directions), is the subject of an ongoing
critical examination by Stanford scholars and students.

As
part of that inquiry, a series of interviews with Fuller's
collaborators, interlocutors and contemporaries began last Winter
Quarter and will pick up again starting Jan. 22. All events are
free and open to the public.

Jeffrey Schnapp, the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian
Literature and director of the Stanford Humanities Laboratory, will
interview Allegra Fuller Snyder, Fuller's only child, from 3
to 5 p.m. Wednesday in the Bender Room of Green Library.

Snyder, a professor emerita of dance and dance ethnology at
the University of California-Los Angeles, is chair of the
Buckminster Fuller Institute board of directors. She started her
career as a dancer and choreographer, and has been interested in
the relation between dance and film since the late 1940s. She has
directed several documentaries on dance and was the 1992 American
Dance Guild Honoree of the Year.

The
next scheduled interview, set for 3 to 5 p.m. Feb. 12 in the Cantor
Center for Visual Arts, will feature Kenneth Snelson.
Snelson was a student at Black Mountain College when he met Fuller
in 1948 and began conducting experiments with
discontinuous-compression structures, which form the basis of many
of his sculptural works. His outdoor sculpture Mozart I
(1982), which sits between Meyer Library and the Stanford
Bookstore, is one such example of this principle. Fuller called it
"tensegrity." A rift eventually developed between the two men, with
Snelson maintaining that Fuller had appropriated his ideas without
properly crediting him.

The
final conversation of the quarter, featuring California State
University-Hayward history Professor Theodore Roszak, is
scheduled for 3 to 5 p.m. Feb. 26 in the Bender Room. Roszak, who
earned his doctorate in history from Princeton, has taught at
Stanford, the University of British Columbia, California State
University-San Francisco and Schumacher College in England. His
books include Longevity Revolution: As Boomers Become
Elders, a study of the cultural and political implications of
lengthening life expectancy in American society, and The Making
of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and
Its Youthful Opposition, a best-selling book on the turbulent
1960s.

Stanford University Libraries acquired Fuller's vast archives
in 1999. Scholars with the libraries and the Humanities Laboratory
are collaborating to produce a critical, contextual picture of
Fuller's life and work, said Michael John Gorman, associate curator
of the libraries' R. Buckminster Fuller Collection and lecturer in
the program in Science, Technology and Society. (The Cantor Center
for Visual Arts joins the libraries and lab in sponsoring the
conversation series.)

Fuller -- called "Bucky" by friends and colleagues --
dedicated his life to looking for ways to end suffering cheaply and
efficiently through technological innovation -- or, as he put it,
to provide "more and more life support for everybody with less and
less resources."

Probably most famous for inventing the geodesic dome, which
was embraced by both hippies and, ironically, the military, Fuller
also is known for such creations as the Dymaxion car and Dymaxion
Dwelling Unit, and as the author of such books as Utopia or
Oblivion, 4D Timelock, Synergetics and
Critical Path.

Thanks to Fuller's Dymaxion Chronofile, in which he documents
his life in 15-minute intervals from 1915 (he was born in 1895) to
this death in 1983, scholars have a lot to work with.

"His is probably the most documented human life in history,"
Gorman said, adding that the archive contains roughly 45 tons of
material. "It's very rare that researchers find someone who creates
problems through an abundance of information, not a lack of
it."